


Faded Elegance

by compos_dementis



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-16 15:55:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/compos_dementis/pseuds/compos_dementis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid is getting older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faded Elegance

He has begun living in a world that skirts reality, a world filled with visions of a brown-haired little boy and a flickering old movie, a world where no one can hurt him. Alone in his apartment, late at night when he is safe from his jumbled thoughts, he will stand up and walk toward the full-length mirror, look at his reflection, and raise his hands as though holding a gun, and he will be Agent Reid, boy genius, once again.

Never mind that his hair is shorter and more choppy, or that he prefers contacts to his horn-rimmed glasses, or that he is well beyond what he had considered to be his intellectual prime. You cannot take the past away from him, for he remembers it with vivid crystal clarity, a day long past when he was still innocent, days long before Tobias Hankel, long before Elle left and Gideon abandoned him.

(Them, he reminds himself. Spencer had not been the only one affected by Gideon's selfishness - despite what the letter had implied.)

He stands and stares at his reflection and a feeling of sick anxiety comes over him. He sways uneasily and then presses a hand flat against the cool reflective surface of the mirror, creating a perfectly smudged hand print over his own face. How sad, and how distant, as though you cannot enter the BAU any longer unless you, too, represent faded elegance.

What he sees in the mirror is no longer the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young man that he had once been. What he sees is a pair of slightly slouched shoulders, and rising up out of a coat's collar is a face on which a bitter, sad look fights for prominence. What he sees is what the other members of the BAU do not want to see. The pattern is never altered: a pat on the shoulder here, a worn and weary look there, and warnings for him to watch his tongue as he grows older and more bitter.

He can get by that way. He won't be happy, but he can pretend, and he will have a subway ride back to his apartment at the end of the day and a TV dinner waiting for him in his freezer.

The septuagenarians who live in his apartment building worry about him on those nights when he doesn't arrive, because they know that the work he does is dangerous, and Spencer senses it, enjoys it. It is nice to have others worry about him rather than vice versa, sometimes. And just as he gets comfortable, another young hotshot applies to and is rejected from the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. Spencer waits for the day when one of them, bright and young, is accepted. When the old furniture goes, Spencer will have to go too.

One could say time is running out on him, but in reality, that had started the moment he'd awoken in Tobias Hankel's shed. The clock has been ticking ever since.


End file.
